Abstract
Few books have instigated the outpouring of sociological research attributable to Bourdieu’s Distinction, now firmly established as a cornerstone of investigations into the social foundations of taste and, more generally, culture. Nevertheless, whether motivated to praise Bourdieu or to bury him, subsequent authors have had to confront the dilemma that the book’s central thesis—concerning a postulated correspondence between social structure and lifestyle differences—could only be fully evaluated with an impractically wide array of data concerning the cultural tastes and practices of families and individuals. Typically forced to rely on secondary data gathered for other purposes, researchers have often found themselves in the awkward position of drawing conclusions on the basis of an empirically truncated assessment of the core thesis.
Some 30 years after Distinction’s publication, Tony Bennett, Mike Savage, Elizabeth Silva, Alan Warde, Modesto Gayo-Cal, and David Wright have finally remedied this situation. Using what one assumes were considerable grant funds, the authors have collected superb data from respondents throughout the United Kingdom on an exceptionally broad range of cultural preferences and activities. Especially impressive is the fact that they have embraced a multi-method strategy. The data they analyze is composed of a set of focus group discussions, a representative (when weighted) survey, a set of open-ended interviews with a small subset of survey respondents, and a handful of interviews with “elites” occupying high positions in business, academia, government, and the labor movement. The data collection instruments and sampling strategies appear to have been well thought out and executed, with the authors keeping one eye focused firmly on Bourdieu and the other on more recent debates and issues (such as the spread of digital media). As a result, the data alone are enough to guarantee that this work will remain at the center of discussions of taste in the foreseeable future.
That said, Bennett et al. have also put the data to good use. Perhaps their most interesting choice was to analyze the survey not (primarily) with the standard tools of linear modeling, but with Multiple Correspondence Analysis (a form of principal component analysis). While MCA was Bourdieu’s preferred statistical tool, the authors clearly were not motivated by blind loyalty, as they are more than willing—indeed, enthusiastic—to depart from him in other respects. Instead, they have made the calculated decision that this is simply the best means to answer many of the questions which motivate the project. The book stands as an artful reminder that regression analysis is not the last word in quantitative analysis; and the combination of MCA and qualitative analysis presents an intriguing version of multi-method research.
The empirical analysis opens with a global model, derived from the survey data, of the patterning of cultural orientations. This is followed by a series of chapters that examine individual “fields” of cultural activity (music, visual culture, etc.) in greater depth, drawing heavily on qualitative material. Finally, a series of chapters assesses the relation between cultural consumption and different dimensions of stratification in detail.
The global model establishes that a number of tastes and practices are distributed more or less uniformly across the “cultural space,” rather than clustering with other tastes and practices. However, a very substantial number do cluster, and together constitute a map of cultural differences in contemporary Britain. The map is defined by four axes of variation. The first (statistically most powerful) axis distinguishes those with high levels of cultural participation and an array of cultural enthusiasms from those exhibiting very low levels of engagement and a preponderance of dislikes. The analysis establishes that this axis corresponds quite closely to both occupational class and educational attainment. To be sure, there is considerable overlap in the tastes and practices of adjacent educational and occupational groups. Nevertheless, culture undeniably marks class in the United Kingdom.
The chapters dealing with particular cultural fields amplify—but also complicate—the findings from the global model in myriad ways. At a general level, the researchers report that “highbrow” cultural tastes—fine art, classical music and opera, modern literature, and so on—remain the near-exclusive province of the economically and educationally privileged segments of the population. But whereas lack of knowledge concerning classical music no longer appears to trigger discomfort or defensiveness, lack of knowledge concerning the visual arts does. In the musical arena, “omnivorism”—understood to entail a taste for a large variety of genres which also spans the highbrow/lowbrow divide—is a fairly rare phenomenon. Choice of newspaper and quantity of television watching are strongly class-linked; the proclivity to eat out and cuisine preferences are similarly tied to economic and cultural capital, but domestic eating habits do not appear to be.
The most provocative finding in the book lies in the authors’ claim that, absent a few residual traces, one can no longer identify anything approximating a distinctive working-class culture in the United Kingdom. Working-class respondents are disproportionately unlikely to engage in most of the cultural activities that figure in the global map, and on a large range of taste measures, it is their expressions of dislike which register. The qualitative data suggest that, for members of this class, “taste is a means of identifying social groups, and is clearly associated with a sense of social hierarchy.” Bennett et al. are careful to clarify that the dissolution of a distinctive aesthetic does not imply Putnam-esque social isolation, much less some kind of general anomie: members of the working-class remain engaged with various elements of “popular” culture—but these are in no way distinguishing. One likely reason for this partial convergence of taste profiles, the authors speculate, is the emergence of an omnivorous orientation among the upper classes, with its in-built tendency to “usurp” elements that, in the past, had been located more or less exclusively in working-class cultural repertoires.
Also highly interesting is the chapter on gender stratification. The third axis of the map of cultural differences distinguishes what the authors refer to as “inwardly” and “outwardly” directed orientations. This distinction underlies preferences for different genres of film (romance versus comedy), painting (renaissance versus landscape), and television shows (soaps versus nature documentaries). As such, it corresponds very starkly to gender differences. Interestingly, the authors demonstrate that this division remains largely constant across social class locations. This places them in direct opposition to Bourdieu, who argued that the gendering of cultural tastes was highly dependent on class position.
In general, Culture, Class, Distinction exhibits a somewhat anxious relation to Bourdieu. While the project is obviously motivated through and through by an attempt to evaluate the generalizability of the Distinction argument, the authors go to great lengths to differentiate their work from Bourdieu’s, both conceptually and in the interpretation of the findings. To take a single example, they deem the concept of habitus irredeemably flawed, and eschew it throughout. One consequence of this, however, is that in a book devoted to the relation between social structure and culture, it becomes unclear exactly what causal story the authors wish to tell—or whether they even aspire to tell one. More subtly, the authors also appear disinclined to admit the idea that cultural tastes may function as symbolic capital. This premise was central to Bourdieu’s argument that taste is implicated in the perpetuation of privilege: for him, the lifestyles of the dominant constitute a “legitimizing theatricalization” of their superior position. Bennett et al., by contrast, are unable to discern any overt snobbishness (or conversely, deference) among their research subjects, and from this seem to conclude that taste is not connected to legitimation in any significant way. But this renders ambiguous the issue of exactly how certain tastes might generate “profits” and what role they may have in processes of social reproduction and transformation.
Regardless of these issues, however, the accomplishments of the book are numerous and important, and it will no doubt take a central place in discussions of the relation between social structure and taste for years to come.